He was speaking at the launching ceremony of the year-long Karavan Karachi Road Sense Programme for schoolchildren here on Wednesday.
The governor said no progress regarding taming of Karachi’s rough traffic could be made without the active participation of the public and children were the best age group to be taught how to follow the traffic regulations.
He praised traffic police for their cooperation with the Karavan Karachi, in briefing different schoolchildren about traffic rules and regulations. “The alarming rate of fatal traffic accidents can only be controlled if each one of us understand the importance of traffic rules,” he emphasised.
He said it was for the first time that police had been involved in educating people and such activities would help develop better relations between the police and the masses.
During the year-long campaign, different programmes will be held in schools, where traffic police officials will brief students, while a poster competition will also be held in this regard.
The governor extended greetings to the Shahwialyat Public School, which pioneered in participating in the programme.
The Inspector General of Police, Sindh, Syed Kamal Shah, informed about the gravity of traffic problems in Karachi and said the city, spread over an area of 366km, had a road network of about 7,400km. More than a million vehicles were registered in the city, he added.
He said though the load had increased with the incoming of visiting and commercial vehicles, the city lacked bypasses for heavy traffic, proper parking space, besides inadequate traffic police personnel and encroachments adding to the problems.
However, Kamal Shah said apart from these problems, the main issue was lack of awareness among the masses regarding the importance of following traffic regulations. He said no campaign could be successful without public involvement.
He acknowledged certain flaws on part of the traffic police also but added that regulations were being enforced strictly and during the last 20 days, he said, 643 drivers of public vehicles had been booked on different charges, which included 390 juvenile drivers.
The IGP praised President Pervez Musharraf and governor of Sindh for increasing traffic fines up to 30 per cent and said so far more than Rs30 million had been collected in this connection.—PPI